Extracting dates from text in Java

Question

Is it possible to extract dates from a string in Java?

I have 500+ string with different data. In them, there can be:
\"... period from 08.23.2011 - 09.05.2011..

Answer 1

I would use a simple regex to get "likely" dates out first, and then parse them more carefully (ideally with Joda Time, IMO). I'd start off with a regex of \b\d{2}\.\d{2}\.\d{4}\b (plus escaping for the Java string of course).

(The \b bit matches a word boundary, so 12345.45.12345 won't match.)

You can make your regex more selective, of course, but it would be very hard to make it do all the validation required (imagine trying to encode all the rules for leap years in a regex) - so if you're going to need to validate as you parse anyway, there's not a lot of point in making the regex complicated.